A History of English Literature by Robert Huntington Fletcher

Jonathan rapid, one other targeted determine of very combined characteristics, is like Defoe in that he connects the reign of William III with that of his successors and that, based on the spirit of his age, he wrote for the main half now not for literary yet for functional reasons; in lots of different respects the 2 are greatly diversified. speedy is among the top representatives in English literature of sheer highbrow energy, yet his personality, his goals, his setting, and the situations of his existence denied to him additionally literary fulfillment of the best everlasting value.

This comparative research attracts on working-class autobiography, public and boarding institution memoirs, and the canonical autobiographies through men and women within the uk to outline subjectivity and cost inside of social category and gender in 19th- and early twentieth-century Britain. Gagnier reconsiders conventional differences among brain and physique, deepest hope and public solid, aesthetics and software, and truth and price within the context of lifestyle.

Top recognized this present day for the cutting edge satire and experimental narrative of Tristram Shandy (1759-67), Laurence Sterne was once no much less well-known in his time for A Sentimental trip (1768) and for his debatable sermons. Sterne spent a lot of his lifestyles as an vague clergyman in rural Yorkshire. yet he brilliantly exploited the feeling accomplished with the 1st instalment of Tristram Shandy to turn into, by way of his dying in 1768, a modern famous person throughout Europe.

McMaster's vigorous learn seems to be on the a variety of codes in which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds in their characters legible via their our bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medication, physiognomy, gesture and facial features, thoroughly customary to modern readers yet to not us, in ways in which enhance our examining of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy , in addition to of novels through Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

Malton examines the literary and cultural illustration of the monetary crime of forgery from the time of big executions of forgers in the course of the early 19th century to the forger's emergence because the final legal aesthete on the fin-de-siècle.

Not Malory but his age, also, is to blame for his sometimes hazy and puzzled treatment of the supernatural element in his material. In the remote earliest form of the stories, as Celtic myths, this supernatural element was no doubt frank and very large, but Malory's authorities, the more skeptical French CHAPTER III. PERIOD III. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES. ABOUT 1350 TO ABOUT 1500 34 A History of English Literature romancers, adapting it to their own age, had often more or less fully rationalized it; transforming, for instance, the black river of Death which the original heroes often had to cross on journeys to the Celtic Other World into a rude and forbidding moat about the hostile castle into which the romancers degraded the Other World itself.

CHAPTER IV. THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA For the sake of clearness we have reserved for a separate chapter the discussion of the drama of the whole medieval period, which, though it did not reach a very high literary level, was one of the most characteristic expressions of the age. It should be emphasized that to no other form does what we have said of the similarity of medieval literature throughout Western Europe apply more closely, so that what we find true of the drama in England would for the most part hold good for the other countries as well.

1. The 'popular' ballads are the simple and spontaneous expression of the elemental emotion of the people, emotion often crude but absolutely genuine and unaffected. Phrases are often repeated in the ballads, just as in the talk of the common man, for the sake of emphasis, but there is neither complexity of plot or characterization nor attempt at decorative literary adornment—the story and the emotion which it calls forth are all in all. It is this simple, direct fervor of feeling, the straightforward outpouring of the authors' hearts, that gives the ballads their power and entitles them to consideration among the far more finished works of conscious literature.